by Wayne Wood
When you’re the new person on the job, you don’t want to miss a
lot of work.
Even if you have a good reason.
Like you’re about to get a kidney transplant.
Laurie Hawkins is a clinical trials specialist at the Vanderbilt Page-Campbell
Heart Institute. She started the job on June 10, and everything was going
fine, until she got some disturbing news during a checkup—her kidney
function was terrible. So low, in fact, that she needed to start dialysis
and was in need of a transplant as soon as possible.
Her kidney function was only 10 percent; people who have twice as much function,
20 percent, are transplant-eligible. No doubt about it, this was a crisis.
“[The doctors] didn’t understand how I was walking around,”
she says. “I was in such denial about it—I just couldn’t believe
it,” she says.
Hawkins’ kidneys had been damaged by an autoimmune disease called immune
complex glomerelonephritis, which is an inflammation of bundles of tiny vessels
inside the kidneys. The damaged bundles, or glomeruli, cannot effectively
filter waste products and excess water from the bloodstream.
She had been diagnosed with the
disease years earlier, and knew that kidney damage was a potential long-term
effect of the condition. But she had been doing OK and had sort of put that
possibility out of her mind because she had never really had any severe problems—until
now.
In the midst of this suddenly very serious health problem, Hawkins was concerned
about herself, of course, but she was also very concerned about her job. She
went to her supervisor, Jana Bazzoli, administrative officer in Cardiovascular
Medicine, and just spelled it all out.
“I said, ‘I don’t know how to tell you this, but they tell
me I’m going to need a kidney transplant, and I don’t want to lose
my job.’”
Bazzoli assured Hawkins that at Vanderbilt people don’t lose their jobs
because they need surgery, and that her job would be waiting when she regained
her health.
“Our whole premise was we wanted to keep her here and keep her happy,”
Bazzoli says.
Hawkins had another concern, too—her sister Paula Roche had agreed to
donate one of her kidneys, and Hawkins had the natural concern for a loved
one who was going to take a risk on her behalf.
Hawkins is 38, her sister is three years younger. Roche says ever since her
sister was diagnosed years ago with a disease that could possibly lead to
a kidney transplant, she had always assumed that, if needed, she would give
her sister a kidney.
“It was always in the back of my head,” Roche says. “I just
always assumed I would be a match. Just a gut feeling.”
She was right, and Roche’s day to help Laurie came on July 30, when the
sisters were wheeled into adjacent operating rooms at Vanderbilt. Hawkins’
surgeon was Dr. David Shaffer, chief of the division of Kidney/Pancreas Transplant.
Roche’s surgeon was Dr. William Nylander Jr., associate professor of
Surgery and a 17-year veteran of the program at VUMC.
The surgery went well, and afterward the sisters were side-by-side in the
recovery room.
“They wheeled her little bed just right next to my bed,” Roche says.
“I said ‘How are you?’ and she said ‘OK’ and asked
how I was doing. I reached over and patted her and she just kept saying ‘Thank
you, thank you, thank you.’ She must have said it 10 times. I said, ‘Stop
it, I’m going to start crying.’”
Right then, there was really nothing more to be said anyway.
Just can’t wait to get on the job again
Even though she is a short-term employee of the Vanderbilt Page-Campbell Heart
Institute, Hawkins feels right at home.
“I have been so impressed at how Vanderbilt handles things,” she
says.
“Dr. [Douglas] Vaughan called me twice. Dr. [Mark S.] Wathen said he
and his wife were praying for me. Nurses that I didn’t even know very
well visited me. They are just like a family over there—the doctors,
the nurses, the caseworkers…”
And she is back on the job again. Her first day back was August 19, about
two and a half weeks after her surgery.
Not everything is the same. Hawkins has to take a daily medication regimen
to ward off rejection of her new kidney and adjust to the side effects of
the medicines.
She has surprised herself with how much energy she has now. For a long time
she had, by sheer force of will, been overcompensating for the energy drain
that her kidney function was causing. Now she finds that she is full of energy.
“I cannot stop—I’m doing things all over the place,” she
says.
She needs that energy because she is overseeing about 30 drug studies in the
Cardiology Clinical Trials office.
And it’s not just work that is keeping the family busy.
Meet niece Avery
Just hours after a kidney was removed from Paula Roche and transplanted to
her sister, Paula’s husband Joseph got a call from an adoption agency
in California. The agency said that a set of soon-to-be birth parents had
selected the Roches as one of their finalist families to adopt their child;
the agency worker was calling to arrange a phone interview.
Joseph had to explain that his wife would not be available for a phone interview
for a while, and he also explained why. The birth parents were impressed by
the selflessness of the potential adoptive mother of their child.
Joseph waited until the next day, when Paula was over the anesthesia, to give
her the news that their dream of becoming parents was perhaps in reach. A
few days later the Roches had a phone interview with the birth parents, and
they were selected for the adoption. The mother in California went into premature
labor, only six days after the surgery. Paula got special permission from
her doctors to travel to pick up the baby.
August 15, they brought their new daughter, Avery, to meet her Aunt Laurie.
“I have a new niece, and a new kidney,” Hawkins sums up.
It was quite a summer.